Beyond college rankings: A value-added approach

Spot on. That said...I think that it might be reasonable to include monetary value as a consideration in determining federal funding support; e.g., federally subsidized loan packages could consider expected earnings and ability to repay as part of determining how much to lend.

Furthermore, the obsession with mid-career salaries is misplaced. Four problems:

1. Focusing on the mid-career salaries can over-value college. Without longer-running longitudinal data, you're essentially just measuring whether colleges / universities provide people with skills that are in high demand in the decade or so following graduation. That says absolutely nothing about the critical back half of people's careers, when they should be earning more than ever and putting a lot of it away for retirement and/or funding the higher education (or business ventures etc.) of their children and/or investing in or starting new businesses.

2. It reeks of (bad) central planning. Is it any surprise that Software Engineers are in such short supply and Lawyers in such over-supply? People were just making "rational" choices when shying away from CS following the dot com bubble burst, and now we have a massive under-supply of skilled software engineers (and, conversely, an over-supply of other types of professions that were supposed to be highly paid). And in X years, everyone's going to shut up about STEM when there's a dip and it's hard to find a high paying job in software. And then we'll be asking why all these idiots are taking out loans to get degrees in CS.

3. Focusing on the mid-career under-values college. Many of the benefits of a well-rounded education -- improved writing, increased awareness of one's own culture and others' cultures, familiarity with different fields, interaction with people who have varying interests, deep connections to people who go into other industries -- are skills that pay dividents especially long after the mid-point in a career. The last one or two decades of a career are when employees are being paid for their insight, discipline, awareness of both the big picture and details, and ability to communicate in addition or even instead of rote technical skills that came from their major.

4. Salary is a poor indicator for the value-add of college at the societal level. If we're going to go down this (ill-advised) route, we should also be measuring things like health of family life, degree to which people contribute back to their community (by taking on voluntary leadership roles), etc.